Skittish: A playful space for online events | Hacker News Reader

Skittish: A playful space for online events

skittish.com

109 pointssillybilly27 comments

Fun! It could use some work on a path finder algorithm though. Having to manually lead around the (many) fences and tables and other obstacles is more annoying than just clicking at my goal and having it figure out the way there.

It also makes my elderly MBP 2015 heat up and make tons of fan noise. I'm not sure if it would be a great fit for family stuff with even older and less powerful machines.

Intel GPU?

I've been attempting to create my own virtual multiplayer world using similar technologies now for the last few months: https://firmament.kenny.wtf/

The tooling and communities in typescript/web land are so good now that even a complete game dev noob like me can create pretty amazing experiences (I think, I've yet to create anything amazing...). I can't wait to see how this space evolves and the toolings/communities around them mature even more

Love it, joined with another capsule friend and had fun bouncing around.

thanks so much!

This actually looks like fun. At some point I wonder where we blend the edges of 'game' and 'collaboration tool'.

On one side you got audio chat like any business application, on the other side you got some kind of animal crossing sandbox.

If you added file sharing and whiteboard thingie, where does it stop?

I wish Rockstar would add drawing-on-a-board support with export to PDF/JPG/PNG to GTA Online, at least in [friends-only][1] sessions.

[1]: https://hypertexthero.com/gta-online-meeting/

It even fits within the game world in terms of using a whiteboard to plan a heist.

Looks similar in terms of concept to https://www.gather.town/

I will try it soon. I think the game changer for any conference tool will be special audio. Very awesome that https://skittish.com/ as well as https://www.gather.town/ have that.

Great work!

The nice thing about WebAudio is that it has spatial audio built into it. It’s really pretty trivial to implement basic spatialisation. That said you generally want a fiddly layer of manual management on top.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/PannerNode

If we're posting playful town-style meeting spaces with cute animals, can't forget about this one: https://pony.town/ (2016)

BABSCon used it this year, and tbh I think it went extremely well: https://twitter.com/ponytownteam/status/1379378405557297157

Pony Town is a classic! It's crazy how popular it is for how sparse the featureset is, I guess it's a testament to the value proposition of sites like this.

Also Mibo: https://getmibo.com/

Also https://workadventu.re/

As someone who has developed similarly playful online spaces with spatial audio I am pleasantly surprised with Skittish. They really "get it" when it comes to essence of digital places in a way that virtually no other apps in the space seem to understand

Glad they exist, and I hope they may inspire people to build more creative, fun, and playful spaces for themselves and their friends :)

The fact that you can just walk forever in any direction is a real issue. People will wander off, get lost, and have no clue how to get back to the "online event"

FYI, if you have video autoplay disabled, the video at the top of the page never starts playing, and there doesn't seem to be a way to start playing it (Safari 15.1)

Skittish and Relm are working on some of the same problems: https://www.relm.us

I couldn't find it in the demo, but having an overview map, or a mini-map overlay, would help a lot.

Or a way to zoom out & zoom back in?

Otherwise I'm worried people will never explore far enough to see everything that's available.

Hi! I work on Skittish. There's a minimap (and spatial audio, chat, emotes, and a bunch of other settings/features) in the full Skittish app that didn't make it into the demo. Create a new event and try it out!

The demo works, nice avatars.

When I try to sign in, though, I get "This browser is not supported or 3rd party cookies and data may be disabled" at the signin page. I'm using Chrome. It might be my ad blocker, but I've disabled everything I can see.

Also on Firefox (no ad blockers) I just get forwarded back to the login page without any progress.

Anyone want to join me? Let's try it out! https://live.skittish.com/event/jon-flash-mob

No one was there so I set the youtube video accordingly

lol

Seems similar to plug.dj

More general than just sharing music videos though.

So basically an online event multiverse?

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